Each year, over 40,000 new students enter America's law schools. Each new crop experiences startlingly high rates of depression, anxiety, fatigue, and dissatisfaction. Kathryne M. Young was one of those disgruntled law students. After finishing law school (and a PhD), she set out to learn more about the law school experience and how to improve it for future students. Young conducted one of the most ambitious studies of law students ever undertaken, charting the experiences of over 1000 law students from over 100 different law schools, along with hundreds of alumni, dropouts, law professors, and more.

How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School is smart, compelling, and highly readable. Combining her own observations and experiences with the results of her study and the latest sociological research on law schools, Young offers a very different take from previous books about law school survival. Instead of assuming her readers should all aspire to law-review-and-big-firm notions of success, Young teaches students how to approach law school on their own terms: how to tune out the drumbeat of oppressive expectations and conventional wisdom to create a new breed of law school experience altogether.

Young provides readers with practical tools for finding focus, happiness, and a sense of purpose while facing the seemingly endless onslaught of problems law school presents daily. This book is an indispensable companion for today's law students, prospective law students, and anyone who cares about making law students' lives better. Bursting with warmth, realism, and a touch of firebrand wit, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School equips law students with much-needed wisdom for thriving during those three crucial years.

About the authors

Kathryne M. Young is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches courses on social psychology, criminal procedure, and sociology of law. Young holds a JD from Stanford Law School, a PhD from Stanford University, and an MFA from Oregon State University. She and her wife live in Northampton, MA.

"Calm, wise, funny, compassionate, creative, enlightened...law students??? Okay, so perhaps these aren't the first words that most lawyers would use to describe themselves at law school, but this eloquent and absorbing book puts such virtues within reach, even for the most harried lawyer-to-be. I'm using it as a guide to a sort-of-happier life, myself, and I'm not even a law student!"

—Ruth Ozeki, bestselling author of A Tale for the Time Being

"This is the ONE book you should read before starting law school—and then re-read every semester. Make sure your parents and your significant other read it, too. Be prepared to laugh, and perhaps to cry. Kathryne Young has seen and done, or at least heard, it all. Learn to love law school and life from her."

—Nora Demleitner, Washington & Lee University

"How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School comes at a most important time in legal education and will be of immeasurable benefit to law students. Kathryne Young's insights—many borne out of her own experience, alongside the experience of many attorneys—offer an honest and rare glimpse into the challenges of law school. Young provides readers with a useful and hopeful path to more fully experience the excitement and realize the opportunities found in law school and the practice of law."

—Scott L. Rogers, University of Miami

"As the saying goes, happiness is a function of expectations. If that's the case, How To Be Sort of Happy in Law School is an important correction to many harmful myths concerning law school success, opening up new ways for students to think about their legal educations and careers. With wit that is only outdone by its wisdom, this book should be included in every law student's admission packet for years to come."

—Osagie K. Obasogie, University of California, Berkeley, Joint Medical Program and School of Public Health